Design And Development Of The Computer Control System For Flotation Process

Flotation is the process through which the qualified concentrate and tailings are acquired by separating valuable ore from tailings with the help of the buoyance of air bubbles in pulp, according to the differences between hydrophilictiy and hydrophobicity of the mineral surface. According to statistics,90% of the non-ferrous metal is sorted with flotation method, which is also widely used in sorting some raw mineral materials such as rare metals, precious metals, ferrous metals,non-metallic minerals etc.For the long process, large amount of equipments, multi-operation patterns and complex monitoring variables of the flotation production process, the flotation process computer system should meet the need of an impeccable process control function and a good monitoring ability.This thesis is supported by the National Science and Technology Supporting Program (Advanced Control Technology of Whole production Line of Mineral Processing 2012BAF19G01)and the Key Automation Project (Synthetic Automation System of Newly Built 4 million t/a mineral processing plant).The author concentrates on the design of computer control system for flotation process and the development of the relevant software. The main works of this thesis can be described as follows:1. The air flotation and medicament preparation in flotation process are introduced separately. The working principle of the main equipment and instrumentation in key position are introduced in detail. And the requirements of computer control system are analyzed.2. The software and hardware of the computer control system has been designed and developed. The hardware platform mainly includes instrumentation and actuator, PLC control system and monitor computer; the software platform mainly includes HMI configuration software and process control software. Based on the platforms, the process monitoring software and the process control software have been designed.3. Based on methods of standardization and modularization, the HMI unified standards, variables defined standards, equipment control modules, loop control modules and trend picture modules have been developed. Based on methods of modularization and algorithms library, the equipment interlocked logic star-stop functional modules, medicine automatic preparation modules, loop control modules, data collection modules and cumulant modules have been developed.4. The computer control system has been applied in industrial site. The performance shows that the computer control system is well able to achieve the process control and process monitoring functions, ensuring the flotation process continuous and stable.